Interview with Keisuke Shinohara, Director of the TV animation "That dress-up doll falls in love": Staff work born of "not trusting my own senses

The romantic comedy "Sono Kisekae Ningyo wa Koi wo Suru" ("That Dress-up Doll Will Fall in Love") depicts the personal relationships between a high school gal, Marin Kitagawa, who likes anime and games and yearns to cosplay her favorite characters, and her classmate, Shinna Gojo, a boy who supports her mainly in terms of making costumes. ). We asked director Keisuke Shinohara, who has painstakingly and brilliantly adapted this popular original manga into an anime, about his directing techniques in detail.

Color" and "voice" support the reality of "Kisekoi

─ ─ The TV animation of "Kisekoi" was frankly interesting, but at the same time there were many things that surprised me. The first thing that surprised me was that in the second episode, an entire episode was devoted to cosplay measurements alone. How did you come up with this bold series structure?

Director Keisuke Shinohara (Shinohara) When I was approached about making a film, I thought it would be best to incorporate as much of the good qualities of the original work into the film. When we started the animation production, the fourth volume of the original work had just been released, and it was difficult to make it all the way to the final episode in terms of volume, so we could not decide on the final episode in terms of the series structure at that stage. Therefore, rather than trying to create a neat overall structure, we decided to proceed initially with the goal of making each episode as interesting as possible. So when we thought about what to do with the first episode, the last one was, after all,
Umumu "Kuroe Shizuku Tan from "Sei ♡ Nuru Nuru Jogakuen Ojousama wa Shame Club Harenchi Miracle Life 2"!
Shinna: "What do you mean?
We thought that ending with this exchange would be the most impactful first episode. That was the first thing we did. If the first episode ended like that, the second episode would be about the measurements as in the original story, but if we tried to include the school story beyond that, it would have been difficult to understand what we wanted to show in the story. Working backwards, we decided to keep the second episode to the measurements and tried to make it interesting somehow with the direction. The artists did their best to respond to that.


───So you decided to end the first episode in the same way, and then expanded on the original story to extend the length of the middle of the episode. The storyboard for the first episode was drawn by the director, what did you have in mind?

Shinohara To be honest, I was worried. I wanted the first episode to be structured in such a way that we would gradually see Kaimu's inner life in the latter half of the episode, so if I added more description of her in the first half, it would only reveal more of her story, which would be uninteresting. Therefore, the only way to make more space in the first episode was to add more descriptions of Shinna. In order to depict more of the house where she lives, I worked closely with art director Hiroyuki Nemoto and assistant director Yoshihiro Hiramine to carefully create the house where she lives. I think I was able to give the viewer a sense of life there. However, I regret that the film started out a little dark because I had to describe more of her inner life during the film.

─ What direction did you aim for in terms of direction and description in the series as a whole?

Shinohara I think the original work has a strong comical impression, but I felt that if I put too much emphasis on that kind of direction from the beginning, the process of building a relationship between the two characters would be lightened, so in the beginning I tried to keep a high level of reality, although it would be an exaggeration to call it realistic (......). I am not very good at incorporating manga-like expressions into my films. However, I tried to keep a balance between the two without going overboard on the realistic side. In the final part of the scene in the clothing training room in Part B of the first episode, I focused on direction and lied about the source of light. In addition to this scene, I tried to keep my feet on the ground in the first half of the series so that I could lie at the right moment.


─ ─ In relation to reality, I wanted to ask you about the cosplay costumes that appear in the film. In actual cosplay, there is a dimensional barrier, so cosplayers can see at a glance that they are wearing the costumes of the characters. However, in the case of anime, both the original character and the costume the character wears are two-dimensional, so there is no difference between the two, and I thought it would be difficult to express the character in cosplay.

Shinohara I tried to reproduce the original work as much as possible. I think this was the result of a series of revisions made from time to time rather than a conceptualization. However, I did emphasize the color element. The uniforms in this work were made to be less colorful and more realistic. On the other hand, the cosplay clothes are more anime-like in hue. I think I was able to create a good difference by doing so. This is thanks to Ms. Yamaguchi (Mai), the color designer, who was willing to accommodate our selfishness. Also, in the cosplay event scene in episode 5, I asked assistant director Hiramine-san to draw original cosplay costumes so that the costumes worn by the mob characters would not be violating copyrights. Since Mr. Hiramine and I had been friends enough to play online games together for some time, we ended up designing a lot of fantasy-type costumes, and I think that is where I was able to create the reality line for the cosplay characters in the "Kisekoi" world.


─ ─ Talking about color, what did you pay attention to in terms of filming?

Shinohara I think the root of this work is comedy, so I basically kept the filming process low key. On the other hand, I made adjustments for each shot where I wanted to make it dramatic. For the final episode, we carefully tested the film before shooting, so we were satisfied with the final result. Again, the filming team was very accommodating. I had never worked with a company that had an in-house finishing and photography department before, so I was very grateful for the environment that CloverWorks provided.

─ For example, the fireworks display scene in the last episode?

Shinohara That's right. Mr. Sakuma (Yuya), the technical director, was in charge of the fireworks display itself, and he gave us instructions on timing and requests for the kind of fireworks we wanted. What was difficult to adjust were the scenes where the fireworks were not directly on the screen. The off-screen fireworks were of various colors, so we repeated many tests with Mr. Kanamori, the director of photography, including the timing of how each color would be reflected on the character's face. There were many retakes of the scene, but I don't think we would have succeeded if we had just shot the scene on the spot.